1. Field of the Invention
The surgical holder or holder and counter is used by doctors and nurses in operating rooms and hospitals when it is required to account for sutures, needles and other surgical products and items used during operations.
This invention relates to surgical accessories and more specifically to a holder for retaining sutures, needles and other surgical products.
2. Description of the Prior Art
During surgical operations, a scrub technician or operating room assistant is required to supply the surgeon with sutures as the occasion arises. The common procedure of holding sutures in place is to arrange bundles of sutures within the folds or pleats of ordinary towels. An average size towel has a limited capacity for holding the sutures. As the bundles become larger, they become correspondingly unmanageable and individual sutures become entangled and stuck together. Also, the individual sutures are not held stably within the folds so when the scrub technician attempts to remove one suture from a bundle it is not uncommon for two or more sutures to become released which slows down the procedure.
In order to keep the towel stationary as it holds the sutures, medical instruments are used to weight it down. If the table upon which the towel rests is jolted then the folds may become opened and the sutures permitted to fall onto the floor. The cumbersome and annoying drawbacks of these foregoing conventional procedures have resulted in certain inventions which have attempted to improve on the present practices but such inventions have not been successfully commercialized.
It is also the standard practice in an operating room for the responsible nurse or person to actually count all sponges, needles and other surgical products used during or made available for the operation to insure that such products have not been left within the interior or a cavity of the patient's body upon completion of the operation. Since the nurse has many other duties in the operating room, it is difficult for the nurse to remember the exact count and to physically keep track of the surgical products utilized.
A search located the following patents which attempt to solve certain of the foregoing problems including the prior patents to Chapel, U.S. Pat. No. 3,481,462 of Dec. 2, 1969 and the patents cited therein; Erickson, U.S. Pat. No. 3,819,039 of June 25, 1974; Slomczewski, U.S. Pat. No. 3,388,790 of June 18, 1968; Grover, U.S. Pat. No. 2,692,676 of Oct. 26, 1954; Tauber U.S. Pat. No. 2,588,589 of Mar. 11, 1952; Dean, U.S. Pat. No. 2,583,043 of Jan. 22, 1952; and Choffell, U.S. Pat. No. 2,176,452 of Oct. 17, 1939.